


with the devil you know you're never alone

by nuricurry



Category: Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII, Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Choking, Corporate Degeneracy, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Power Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:40:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24242956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nuricurry/pseuds/nuricurry
Summary: There was not a person among the Turks who was not acquainted with their methods for tying up loose ends. Cracks in the foundation were quickly filled before they could properly break; immediate results were the only kind that the Turks dealt in, especially when it came to one of their own. He expected the order of execution. What he did not expect was Rufus Shinra stopping it.
Relationships: Rufus Shinra/Tseng
Comments: 1
Kudos: 40





	with the devil you know you're never alone

_A lapse in judgment._ To refer to his decision regarding Veld as a moment of weakness was to do a disservice to his own intellect. It implied that he had made a choice that, if given the chance to correct, he would choose differently. It implied regret. None of those things were factors. He was well aware of his actions, he was already prepared for the consequences. His choice was one that he made because it was the course of action he wanted to take.

It simply was not the choice that Shinra expected of him.

There was not a person among the Turks who was not acquainted with their methods for tying up loose ends. Cracks in the foundation were quickly filled before they could properly break; immediate results were the only kind that the Turks dealt in, especially when it came to one of their own. He expected the order of execution. What he did not expect was Rufus Shinra stopping it. 

Though, he could not say he was caught completely by surprise. He had learned many things since being brought into Shinra, since being put into a position where he could observe the President’s son, and first and foremost among those things was that Rufus loathed being predictable. 

He was not his father, who followed patterns and was beholden to convention. Shinra boasted its strides in innovation, yet always fell into the same exhausted habits. Rufus was the true wielder of Shinra’s contemporary thinking. It was fitting that his choice in Tseng’s punishment reflected that. 

“I hear in Wutai, cutting the hair is an act of shame,” he informed his father from his place further down the board members' table, “Isn’t that true?” his eyes shifted to Tseng, his mouth pulled up in the corners with a smirk. He did not wait for confirmation, clearly already certain, before he addressed his father again. “He’s too valuable to just throw away. But we should still make an example out of him.” 

An example. Tseng’s head on the front steps of Shinra would have accomplished the same goal, but clearly that was far removed from the presentation that Rufus wanted. He wanted a less ostentatious hand; execution was too old-fashioned for his taste.

And as always, Daddy gave him his wish.

It came as no surprise that Rufus took it upon himself to dole out his sentence. It was his idea after all; why wouldn’t he personally see it through?

He’s on his knees in the President’s suite, the plush red carpet doing little cushioning. Rufus holds the razor in his hand, it’s faint hum like the low rumble of insects boring into his ear. “Shaving it all off almost seems generous,” he says as his fingers slide down the handful of strands he took into his hold, “One could argue that with it all gone, there might have been a good reason for it. Maybe you were sick, maybe you had an accident…” he supposes, and as he releases the hair in his hand, he steps behind Tseng, out of his line of sight. “Maybe I should just do half of it; you can’t pretend it isn’t on purpose then, right?” He laughs, low and wicked, and then suddenly his hand is in his hair again, rough and tight as he seizes a fistful of it and pulls his head back in order to force Tseng to look up at him. "I wonder what your people would say about that."

_Your people,_ because that is what his culture is now regulated to: insults, barbed words spit at him in order to keep him in line. Because his worth was always defined by what he offers, and for as much as Shinra hates Wutai, it loves having one of its sons under its boot. The entire reason he was picked up was because he was Wutai, because he knew their language, their customs, their secrets. He was perfect for his intended purpose, an asset from inside enemy lines.

Wutai had let him go for the exact same reason.

Shinra had bombed the village he was born in two days after he turned nine. He watched people die, watched as they ran from their burning homes screaming as the chemicals Shinra threw in with their weapons ate through their clothes and their flesh. He watched Shinra soldiers drag civilians into paddy fields and then heard them beg for mercy, only to be silenced by the sound of a bullet. 

He escaped to the city because there was nothing left in the mountains. But Shinra was there too, there was no escaping them, especially not when word spread through the underground that they were looking for children to take, children to bring home and gentrify and use in their training exercises. For that, Tseng was a perfect candidate.

His sister was a prostitute. She sold him in order to feed herself. Wutai was nothing but slums full of whores and rats, and he was nothing more than a combination of both.

That's what Shinra wanted to believe, and so they believed it. For a company that boasted about having their eyes on the future, they were incredibly shortsighted.

His sister wasn't a whore. He didn't grow up in slums with rats and drugs. He was sold, but only to play to Shinra's idea of transactional value, to allow them to feel power over him, to give them a sense that he had a debt now to repay.

The truth was that his sister was not related to him at all-- not that Shinra noticed. She was a member of the guerrilla faction, and her job was to pass him off to Shinra, to cry and look poor and desperate. His job was to let Shinra take him, and use him, and then poison the well, for revenge, for honor, for homeland.

It was hardly difficult. The company was already fractured. He didn’t even have to try. Boring, really.

“The President’s son needs a playmate.”

What a kind word for indentured servitude.

Rufus Shinra was seven years old when they first met, and already he had aspirations beyond the scope of inheritance. Though, that was not something immediately obvious, not to his teachers and his maids and his father. To them, he was a spoiled child, a boy who sat in on his father’s meetings because he idolized the man and demanded gifts and special treatment because he saw it as a facet of some parental love. Rufus Shinra was none of those things. He played hide-and-seek in his father’s office to eavesdrop on his conversations, muttering criticisms and alternative solutions under his breath. He asked his father for the moon and the stars because he wanted to test how much his father was willing to give him, and how much he would have to earn on his own. Very little, it turned out, but that did not lead to laziness. No, rather it led to idle hands and idle minds, and as the saying goes, those were the Devil’s playthings. 

Rufus Shinra was certainly the Devil.

Before he was fifteen, Rufus Shinra had purchased loyalty through sex and influence. By the time he was sixteen, he had taken to selling his father’s secrets. At seventeen, he was given the Vice President position.

All along the way, he kept Tseng in the position of his assistant. He was brought to Midgar to serve him, after all.

Wutai was a tonal language. Pitch mattered, the shape of one’s lips, the way the tongue was held, the position of it in the mouth, it changed everything about the syllable. In Midgar, there was no such thing as pitch changing the entire word, no comparison when it came to identical words being said in different ways to say different things. 

Rufus has two fingers shoved into his mouth, pressing onto his palate. “Say it again,” he instructs, “Show me the difference.”

He complies. He repeats the sentence again, lets Rufus feel the way his mouth moves, how each sound is unique, even if it’s the same word to his ears. 

“Fascinating,” Rufus laughs, hard, mocking. His fingers slip free from Tseng’s mouth, but before he can close it, Rufus takes hold of him by the jaw, holding him in place, keeping him in the same position as before. “How does it feel,” he asks slowly, as his cold blue eyes stare down into Tseng’s face, “when you speak my language instead?” Then, without any preamble, any warning, he spits into Tseng’s mouth.

“Manners, Vice President,” he says, and then swallows, “What would your father say?”

If he were to believe traditional psychoanalysis, he could suppose that the behavior was a cry for attention. Fucking the foreign whore (because he was bought and paid for-- that was a whore) and misusing his father's funds, on the surface it looked exactly like that. Like a son who craved his father's attention, who wanted to be acknowledged, even if that came with consequences and punishment.

Except that was not the truth. Not only because his father couldn't possibly care less about his son's debauchery, but because Rufus himself had no compulsion to earn his approval. The feelings between father and son were ironically mutual; they were simply feelings of apathy and disinterest.

Rufus did not need his father’s power and wealth to succeed; it just made things easier, which in turn granted him more time to pursue his own interests. Another gift from his father, in a way, a fact which Tseng brought up to him only once, after the stay of execution, after he cut his hair.

“A man needs his hobbies,” he says from his place on the floor, supplicant and amenable between Rufus’ knees.

Rufus smiles, tight, feral, and when he responds, his voice holds heat like coals-- warm, dangerous, threats to ignite hiding just below the surface. “Well, what’s the point if there's no fun in it?”

Truly, what’s the point? “As long as you’re having fun, sir,” Tseng says, and then swallows the head of his cock.

One would think he’d learn a little humility by that point, all things considered.

There isn't an option to pull him by his hair now. There's nothing to take hold of, nothing to grip, nothing to use to hold him in place, the way he was used to. So he just resorts to choking him when he wants to get a point across.

A thumb pressed into his hyoid was not necessarily painful, at least not until the oxygen stopped, and his head lightened and spots colored his vision. What was painful was when he'd hold him by the throat too long, but also not long enough because Tseng could still look up at him, and see the way he watches as the color drains from his lips and his eyes lose their focus. Testing the limits. Pushing boundaries. Playing with his food.

“Sir,” his voice is a rasp, and his eyes roll back, “harder.”

Company loyalty is born from generosity. 

There is not an inch within Shinra tower that Rufus does not view as his property. Even his father’s office is his in his mind, and that is not proven more than by the fact that he has fucked Tseng throughout it. 

The dark skyline of Midgar at night is broken by illuminated signs and mako reactors, advertising for products and services that all tie back to Shinra in some way. The company’s pockets are deep, their influence deeper, and Tseng is left to contemplate the latest skincare product emblazoned on a distant marquee for too long, long enough for Rufus to notice.

“You’re at work, Tseng,” he says as he stops fucking him. Tseng was pressed against the window before, but now Rufus is pulling out of him and forcing him down onto all fours. “Learn to pay attention.” And then he puts his knee into his back, right on top of where the scars from hundreds of pounds of steel nearly crushed him to death.

The pins in his third and fourth vertebrae make arching his back difficult, but that's precisely why Rufus makes him do it. He keeps his knee dug into the dip of his spine, and his hand around his neck as he bears down, and Tseng has no choice but to bend or have the entire column scream in protest until it snaps.

The pain, the metal rods, the scars, they're property of Shinra Electric. Reminders of the fact that he is owned, he is collateral, he has a market value that depends entirely on how good he sucks dick and how many people he's killed that week.

His worth is conditional, but so is his loyalty.

He has no love for Shinra. Nor does he harbor any lingering affection for Wutai. But Rufus Shinra at least makes things interesting.


End file.
